The short answer: Velero Insurance Group, an independent Medicare and health insurance brokerage, was losing clients to payment failures that slipped past a manual monitoring process. We built an automated recovery pipeline that catches every failed payment the day it happens, contacts the client directly, and escalates anything unresolved back to the broker before the policy lapses. It's early in delivery, so the impact below is projected from the brokerage's real book size and process, not a measured result yet.
Most businesses put the most effort into the hardest, most expensive customer to win: a brand new one. The cheaper save is usually already in the customer base you have, leaving quietly because a routine process nobody owns let them slip.
The problem: a 30-day window nobody was watching
When a client's policy payment fails, the carrier sends an email. Someone has to notice it, work out which client it belongs to, check the details, and follow up in person. If that doesn't happen inside the carrier's grace period, usually around 30 days, the policy lapses. The client loses coverage, and the broker loses the residual commission that policy paid every month.
At around 800 clients, watching for this by hand doesn't hold up. The notices arrive at odd hours, in different formats, mixed in with everything else. Every one that gets missed is a direct hit to recurring income, and the broker often doesn't find out until a client calls asking why their coverage stopped.
This isn't a marketing problem. The client was already sold. It's an operations gap showing up as a slow leak in monthly revenue.
What we built
An automated payment-failure recovery pipeline that runs on the account RJ already uses:
- Carrier emails get monitored automatically. Nobody has to catch them by hand.
- Each failure is matched to the right client record. The system works out who the payment belongs to without a manual lookup.
- A personalized text and email go out the same day. The client hears about it while there's still plenty of time to fix it, not on day 29.
- Anything unresolved goes back to RJ. If the client doesn't respond, the case lands on his desk before the grace period runs out, with the context already attached.
His job shifts from "watch every carrier email forever" to "handle the few cases that actually need a person."
What we expect it to do
These are estimates based on the brokerage's real book size and current process, not measured outcomes. We label them projected until the automation has run long enough to report real figures.
- Time back. The notice-lookup-draft-send cycle goes away for every routine failed payment. As the book grows past 800 clients, that's projected to save several hours a month currently spent on administrative catch-up.
- Revenue protected. Every policy that lapses from a missed payment is a lost residual commission. Same-day outreach is built to catch failures early in the 30-day window, which protects recurring income that's otherwise at risk.
The takeaway
Before you spend more at the top of the funnel, look at the bottom. The clients you've already won are cheaper to keep than new ones are to find, and they often leak out through a process no one owns because it never felt urgent enough to fix.
This is the kind of work automation is genuinely good at: the unglamorous, repetitive monitoring that a person will always eventually let slip.